Racing's Best Top Jockeys - Don't Forget Mike Smith

By Author: Lee Lane-Edgar
Total Articles: 365
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Mike Smith is certainly one of the very best jockeys in the United States horse racing scene today, but a look back at his career suggests clearly that he is one of the best jockeys of all time, not of just this time.  When it’s all said and done, his name will go down with the other all-time greats from his and other eras.  Men like Eddie Arcaro, Willie Shoemaker, Laftit Pincay, Jr., Gary Stevens, Jerry Bailey, Kent Desormeaux, and Garrett Gomez are all great, but Mike Smith is right up there with all of them.  He takes a back seat to nobody.  Not even forty-seven years old, Smith is moving toward the career milestone of 5,000 career victories, and barring injury will reach that mark sometime in 2012.  He was already a Hall-of-Famer before 5,000 wins even came up on his horizon, but reaching 5,000 wins this year will serve as the icing on an already fabulous career cake.  

When looking at Smith’s career, there is seemingly nothing he hasn’t done, except ride a Triple Crown winner.  But he has more than made up for that by doing virtually everything else a jockey can do in the sport of horse racing.  What? ...
...  You want to know what major races he has won in his career?  Really, the correct question is what race HASN’T Smith won.  How about awards?  Smith has won them all.  Hall of Fame?  Already named in 2003.  How many great horses has Smith ridden and ridden to victory.  Too many to count is the right answer, but let first start by saying that Mike Smith has ridden TWO horses that won the Eclipse Award for Horse of the Year.  TWO!!!  Do you know how many jockeys out there that would give their right arm in a second for the chance to ride a Horse of the Year winner?  All of them.

Smith rode Holy Bull in all of 1994, guiding that horse to a splendid campaign in which he was so great that he skipped the Breeders’ Cup and still won Horse of the Year in a landslide vote.  For his work that year, Smith was honored with his own Eclipse Award for Most Outstanding Jockey, a title he also won the previous year, as well as the Venezia Memorial Award.  He also won an ESPY in 1993 as the top jockey.  In 2000, Smith won the Woolf Memorial Jockey Award, and also claimed the Big Sport of Turfdom Award in both 2009 and 2010.  In 2009 Smith helped guide Zenyatta to a stirring come-from-dead-last, not-just-behind victory.

The list of major stakes races that Smith has won in his career is too long to cover race by race.  His first major win came in the 1990 Manhattan Handicap, and within three years of that win, Smith was literally on top of the racing world.  He’s won all the major Kentucky Derby prep races, like the Santa Anita Derby, the Wood Memorial, and the Florida Derby, just to name a few.  He had not won the Kentucky Derby yet when, in 2005, he rode a 50 to 1 shot by the name of Giacomo.  He had already won the Preakness in 1993, so to win the Derby in such dramatic fashion was a real reward.  Smith then went to Belmont Park in Elmont, in 2010 and won the Belmont Stakeks,. which meant that, in addition to all his other accomplishments, he had won each of the 3 Triple Crown races.

The most notable race of Smith’s career came in 2009 when the amazing mare Zenyatta took on the boys in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.  Smith let Zenyatta drop way back at first.  Then, when Zenyatta started moving on the turn, Smith expertly prepared Zenyatta for any opening.  Smith found it, asked the big mare to go where he asked, and she responded, becoming the first femae in history to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic.  Mike Smith will go down in history as one of the all-time greats.